


ozymandias

by supinetothestars



Category: Dream SMP - Fandom, Minecraft (Video Game), Video Blogging RPF
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-15
Updated: 2021-02-15
Packaged: 2021-03-16 14:53:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 876
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29455572
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/supinetothestars/pseuds/supinetothestars
Summary: Wilbur was Ozymandias, king of kings, and Tubbo has been left to look upon his kingdom in despair. (In a slow-burn horror. In a numbness that creeps from his fingertips to his hands to his elbows, edging out the singing burn of his palms - blistered from where his hands had clawed at the red-hot rubble hours earlier.)--Or: Tubbo watches the ruins of L'Manberg, and reflects.
Relationships: Toby Smith | Tubbo & Wilbur Soot
Comments: 9
Kudos: 24





	ozymandias

Tubbo stands before the crater where his city once had been, the stars above his head and fires flickering out below his feet, and comes to a conclusion that’s been long in the making and slow in the realizing: L'Manberg is ruined. It has been stomped beneath the feet of TnT and anarchy and it has passed the summit of that long and steady fall from a grace that Tubbo is no longer sure ever existed, a grace that Tubbo has begun to think was nothing more than a spectre of his own imagination wrought by the smoke-and-mirrors illusion of greatness that had been L'Manberg’s founding. Everything had seemed to line up so clearly, then, to fall in place so neatly; this city had been his home, once. This city had been everything.

And now this city is gone. Faded to smoke amid the ruins. Tubbo was meant to rule this place, meant to lead it through the darkness as its president; now he looks upon it, ears ringing with the never-fading aftermath of explosives, and feels only an overwhelming awareness of how little is left, of both the city and its creator. 

Wilbur was Ozymandias, king of kings, and Tubbo has been left to look upon his kingdom in despair. (In a slow-burn horror. In a numbness that creeps from his fingertips to his hands to his elbows, edging out the singing burn of his palms - blistered from where his hands had clawed at the red-hot rubble hours earlier.) 

And now Tubbo watches L’Manberg and sees only smoke hanging in the air too thick to see the sun through, and fires flickering in the darkness of the pit, and a spread of dirt and rubble shadowed by an obsidian goliath in the sky.

And now Tubbo looks upon a L'Manberg naught but ruins, that  _ boundless, lone, and levelled sand _ \- and gunpowder, and melted iron sagging into the ground amidst the tinge of explosives from blasted TnT - and struggles to breathe through the sour taste of blasts and smoke and a cold, dull panic that is slowly receding from his limbs.

Everything is numb and yet everything hurts. The air around him is so devastatingly hot, so thick with firelight wafting from the crater below, so singing and warm that he finds himself shivering with the cold of it, as if he’s been washed in ice. Foot to forehead his body trembles.

(This is what Wilbur never lived to see, Tubbo recalls. The thought can’t seem to slip from his mind. It hangs there, in the background, like some kind of buoy not quite drowned by the current of a river. Almost, but not quite, overshadowed by the waves. Panic strums through him in bursts and then fades, and pain sharply spikes at his hands, and a million scenarios are running through his mind. Wilbur never lived to see this, he thinks.

And how unfair, that Wilbur should have created the wrath of his own destruction. How terrible, that Wilbur’s making had been his undoing. He had been a natural leader. How naturally, too, he had fallen. That’s all that’s remembered of Wilbur, now, the falling. The falling and the bare-bones skeletons of buildings, blasted to shreds on the horizon. The singe of gunpowder in the throat, is how L'Manberg had remembered Wilbur. The flashing of TnT tearing through city pavement is all that Tubbo can think of, now, as he stares at the wreck of a city and tries to summon up an image of a man he’d once known. L'Manberg had remembered Wilbur as a lit fuse and the blast of gunpowder. Tubbo struggles to recall him beyond that shattered visage, crumpled amid the wreckage. The days before his dying, when Wilbur’s slow descent had reached a pace of proper falling. That sneer of cold command.)

(Wilbur was a great man, once, if not a good man; Wilbur had been a king of kings, a lord of lords, in the manner that only those who had been led by him would ever know; there was a reason Tommy had followed him so far, a reason he had fought so long and so fruitlessly. He had a way of believing in things that was more dangerous than anything, more like a lit fuse than a spark of inspiration to those who ventured too near. So many near Wilbur had loved him. So many near Wilbur had been burned. )

There’s a tinge of blue on the horizon, catching Tubbo’s eye. It is pale against the warm, dark grays and oranges of the fallen city: it is Ghostbur, floating through the wreckage. He is saying something, muttering to himself, but Tubbo can’t hear him.

This is how Wilbur remembers himself, Tubbo realizes, as he watches Ghostbur’s slow meander. This is all he can recall. A hollow figure, all transparent. A blue that flickers red with the firelight behind it. A soft yellow sweater and a hoarse voice. No gunpowder, no flags, no tattered trench-coats. In death Wilbur faded into pleasant things and forgetfulness. 

(Tubbo can’t bring himself to blame Wilbur for that - that small crime, that easy abandoning of who he’d once been. He only wonders how long it will take him to follow in those footsteps.)

**Author's Note:**

> leave comments they make me happy >:)


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